Some of the most difficult times I’ve had as a freelance teacher, and I’m sure you can relate to this, has been during vacation times. Today’s podcast will help you think about solutions that will help you serve your students even better, while keeping your income FLOWING even during vacation times.

Christmas, Easter, summer vacations when school is out….

The weird thing, we know these times are coming – they don’t change from one year to the next – yet we rarely think ahead for them, right?

Every year – say for Christmas, do you find yourself in scramble mode, trying to figure out how to make ends meet when your students stop taking class for the season?

Here are a few ideas to help you brainstorm your vacation day cereal bag!

Kids:

Most kids get off from school at certain times ofthe year – but parents must keep working…what if you offered a camp or special after school/ out of school program to help parents who still need to work.

My wife works in an after school program. What if you offered one?

Adults – working professionals, if that is your market, are used to going to training workshops. Seminars. Webinars.

What is stopping you from offering one? Or two? Or three over the next month or two?

What topics are areas of need for your students? Don’t think about grammar or vocabulary, or fluency. Think about e-mail writing, how to make effective English presentations with powerpoint, How to ace your next English conference call?

One company we worked for hired us to do a whole series of workshops around effective e-mail in English and power pointpresentations.

We charged much more than regular classes because they were short, and the material easy to cover.

Key Questions to help you begin to move forward:

Who do you serve?

What pain points do you see?

How much $$ Do you need to cover your seasonal down time?

How much do you need to charge per student/participant and how many times do you need to provide your solution to cover your costs?

Today’s podcast episode will help you answer this vital question: How do I Make my ESL Teaching Business Stand out in a Crowded Market?

The problem you might be facing:

You are in a crowded English class marketplace.
There are likely hundreds…thousands of teachers or schools around you competing for the students you are seeking.

Most of these companies make the mistake of competing on price – we’ll give you classes cheaper than company X, Y, Z.

There are other ways to compete that will protect your income, and actually enable you to charge more if you get it right!

It might be helpful to think about a soundboard, and each point on your soundboard is something about your business that can be adjusted.

Some common settings

What you offer – English classes
How much you charge
How you offer your classes- in your location? Their location? Coffee shop? School?
Materials You use.
Customer Service
OTHER – why, who, relationship

From our Sponsor:

Do you need help in selling your services as a freelance English teacher? Would you like to follow a tried and true process that will help you attract new clients to you instead of you coming off as just another pushy or annoying sales person – then you’ll love this e-book:3 Simple But Powerful Sales Secrets Every Freelance ESL Teacher Must Know To Get New Students.

Compete on WHY
What’s your ‘why’ behind what you do? Why are you an English teacher? What problem do you see that you want to fix? What motivates you to teach?
Are you telling your ‘why’ story on your website? When you are talking with prospects?
KNOW Your Why – people who agree with what you believe or who are touched by your why will be drawn to you!
My why: The student, not the school, is the focus of everything we do.

Compete on Who you serve
Most ESL companies out there will take in anyone and everyone willing to pay them, right? It’s one size fits all!
Why don’t you change that by becoming an expert at serving Hotel reception workers? Or by helping kids with autism? Or by helping nurses/doctors learn English for medical needs?
The point: differentiate yourself be being hyper focused.How?
Listen to your heart – what are you passionate about?
Who have you served in the past and LOVED?
WHAT have you done in the past that you loved – where you previous technical experience that you can bring to your classes? Are you a graphic designer? What if you provided English classes for graphic designers?

Compete On Relationship/Service
Most companies out there, especially mainstream ones, are terrible at service. IT’s their way – or you can work with someone else. They don’t care!
What if you moved the service button on your business to the max.
What if your company’s objective was to serve students and other people involved in ways they never thought possible?
Being available to answer questions
Meeting with key people to your business – parents, HR managers etc, on a regular basis just to see how they are making out, and what you can do to serve them better?
Being completely friendly and personable – develop relationships with the people you serve! Don’t treat them ‘like a client.’ Treat them the way you would like to be treated.

Getting your first student can be a big step to take – it’s where you go from being in your head, from planning, dreaming, designing your freelance business to actually making it become reality – in that you create income from your work. But getting your first student can be a challenge unless you follow a few simple steps.

Find out more in today’s episode:

Get Your First Student: Step One

Start with who you know!

Your personal network of family, friends, and coworkers will often be able to help you find your first student.

You don’t know who you know – make a list of your warmest connections.

Is your target Working adults: List friends/family who work, and where they work.

Is your target Kids or Students: List friends or family who have kids, and where they go to school.

Step Two: Create A Simple Marketing Tool

Poster

Flier

Remember to keep it simple – use templates you have on your computer. Or look for free ones online.

Use a catchy image – make it fun.

Can you come up with a catchy slogan or title? (DON’T be boring! Be different, and be fun!)

Create Your Offer

In your ad, tell people what they will get if they work with you, and how much you will charge – never hide your price or make your prospects call you to ask! (That sucks!)

Key ingredients:

Promise – how you will help/impact someone’s life! (Think: what’s in it for them?)

Example: I’ll help you deliver your next English business presentation with ease and confidence.

The pitch: Call me today for a free 30 minute introductory session. After that, sessions are 60 minutes for only $250 pesos.

The price and how to reach you: explain what you charge, and how prospects can reach you. (Your name, e-mail, cell/phone #)

Step Three: Connect

Reach out to your connections and tell them what you’re doing.

Ask for their help:

To place your marketing tool somewhere for you

To meet someone they know who may need your services

Supply your marketing tool.

If your contact agrees to help, give them some of your marketing tools.

Agree how they will deploy that tool.

Let them know you will reach out in a few days to see how it went.

Thank them! Massively important!!

Report back – when/if you get your first student through their efforts, make sure you get back to thank them. Take them for coffee or a meal. Let them know what happened, and how grateful you are for their help!

Step Four: Create Connection

Immediately connect with warm contacts – if your friend/family/coworker refers you to someone – gives you a prospect’s name and contact info, immediately reach out to that person. They are likely expecting you. (Or immediately write that e-mail.)

Introduceand Create Connection between yourself and mutual friend, then say you heard they might be interested in taking classes with you.

Listen – don’t sell.

Invite to meet – if appropriate, invite the prospect to meet you for coffee or a quick 10/15 minute meeting to discuss their needs. Respect their time!

Step Five: Educate & Close

During meeting – listen more. Ask about their work, their goals and why English is important to them.

Listen. Don’t try and sell. Just listen.

Teach how you work: LINKWhen you feel like they’ve shared what they wanted to share with you about their needs, briefly Link some of what they say to how you provide your classes. (As long as how you work connects with what they are needing!)

Explain your schedule openings, or find out what their ideal schedule time is.

4 Steps to An Effective Sales Process for ESL Teachers

1. Qualify your Prospects! You don’t want to try to do business with everyone who may want English classes, just like you don’t want to teach an unorganized crowd of students. Think about how your class is organized for a minute: in most circumstances, your students are organized according to their skill level, fluency skills, and overall ability with English, right? You hopefully won’t have a beginner student sitting in on your advanced conversation group. In other words, your students are qualified or screened before they are assigned a class. (Or they should be!)

A. Can they afford you? State your fees clearly in your marketing and website if you have one. Don’t make prospects call/write you to find out how much you charge. That sucks! If your prospect knows how much you charge, they can decide if they can fit you into their budget or not, and you’ll save time (most of the time) by not having to explain how much you charge – they will know before they call you.

B. Do they have the time to work with you? When you communicate with your prospect, be sure to convey optimal class times with them. Perhaps you could point out that you structure your classes to 2 days a week of 1.5 hours each class. (If you do, of course.) Let your prospect know how much time per week/month they should commit to working with you, and inform them of your cancellation policy. (Yes, you should have one.) That way you will help them notice if they ‘have too much work on their plate right now’ to start classes with you. It’s terribly frustrating to get a student to start with you only to have them cancel after a few classes because they just can’t keep up with their workload AND your classes.

2. Focus on Building Relationships. Do you cold call your students? Or do you take time to build a warm relationship with them before AND as you start teaching? I bet you are a great teacher who works hard to create and nurture warm relationships with the people you teach. You likely don’t just dive into your lesson without taking the time to ‘visit’ with your class first, right?

“How was your weekend?” “What are you working on this week, any big projects?” “How was your trip over the weekend?”

Great teachers know that teaching is all about building relationships with their students, and selling your services is too. Don’t jump to the sale, even if you are feeling desperate for one. Take a few minutes to build rapport with your prospect before you begin talking business.

You can easily and quickly build rapport with a prospect by: 1. Showing up to your meeting with them 5 minutes early. (NEVER late.) 2. Dress the part. If this is a business setting, dress they way you see others in the company dressing. (You should visit the location before hand if you can and observe.) Follow their dress code. 3. Make sure you look together – visit the bathroom before you meet your prospect, is your hair in place? Nothing hanging from your teeth? Tie on straight? Check! That’s part of the idea of arriving early. 4. Make sure your breath is not toxic. Chew some gum or suck on a breath mint before your meeting – and spit it out before your prospect arrives. 5. Make great eye contact, and have a firm handshake.

When you’re in the meeting, take time to interact with your prospect. Do you see pictures of family members on their desk? A picture from a trip? A cool sculpture or painting? Mention it. Ask about it. Engage in ‘small talk’ a bit.

Teach them how you work. You are the expert about how you work. You better be able to explain the material you use, and why. Can you talk about your methodology, and why you use it? Can you discuss the administration side of your work? How reports and exams will be, and when they can expect them? Know your business inside and out, and be ready to teach it to your prospect. Always check for questions.

Close the deal. If you do a great job on qualifying your prospects, building relationship with them, and teaching them about how you work, the final stage of closing the deal should come naturally.

After you’ve explained how you work, and they signal there are no more questions, calmly take them to the next step – try saying something like: “If you have no more further questions, would you like to set up a free demo class for this Thursday at 7:30a.m. so you can see how it feels to work with me?” Basically, assume the close will happen. If they aren’t ready to say yes, patiently go through the previous steps again. Check, or probe for more questions.

After your demo class: After you rock your demo class, and you will, check with your prospect about how they felt. Also ask them if they have any more questions after working with you. Do your best to answer any and every question they may have, and then….drum roll…..close the REAL DEAL. If they indicate happiness with your demo class, and that they have no questions, feel free to invite them to start working with you like this: I have Tuesdays and Thursdays open at X. When would you like to begin?

Have you ever stopped to examine how you earn your sales? As a freelance ESL teacher, you should have a very simple but well thought out sales process to help you build your business!

My son just started a music class with a freelance teacher through the daycare he attends, and I noticed a few things that the teacher is doing really well, and one thing that fell through the cracks for her as she worked to close the sale with us. I wonder if you have ever made the same mistake she made – I know I have!

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

What went really well:

She connected with us through referral.

If you’re not working with referrals in your sales process, you need to be! It’s very likely THE best way for you to earn new business. The music teacher in our son’s case worked through the daycare’s director. The director, a very nice lady, asked us one afternoon if we’d be interested in having our son participate in music classes and that the daycare was working with a wonderful teacher who absolutely LOVED helping kids get into music and singing. This sounded great to us, so we agreed to put our name down on a waitlist for the next music group to begin.

A few days later we got a call from the music teacher. She was warm, friendly, and super easy to talk to over the phone. She quickly explained how she worked, and what kinds of activities she normally did with kids, explained her very simple fee structure, and then asked if we’d like to sign up. Her simple sales process!

Done deal, and all from a referral. It didn’t feel pushy or weird to get the call from the music teacher – in fact, it was really nice to hear from her. (Wouldn’t you like your ‘sales’ conversations to feel like that? Use referrals!)

Call Your Prospects:

The second thing the music teacher did an awesome job at was calling us – as I mentioned above. She didn’t wait long to do so, either. It was no more than a couple of days after we had that talk with the daycare director. Not a week. It wasn’t in two weeks, and it wasn’t a month. Just a few days! That’s important! If you get a referral from a friend or client, don’t take long to follow up! Do it while they’re warm! (The referral will be more likely to remember hearing about you. In our case, we knew/remembered the music teacher as soon as she mentioned her name and what she did.)

Mention The Referrer:

Within the first 30 seconds of the phone call with the music teacher, after she mentioned her name and what she did, she quickly let us know that the daycare director had given her our names because we were interested in working with her. That’s massively important! Hearing the director’s name IMMEDIATELY helped us relax – because we know the daycare director much better than the music teacher, right? Same goes for you! In your sales process, when you connect with a contact that a client or friend refers to you, be sure to always mention who did the referring! This will help your prospect relax.

The mistake – the one I’ve made, and the one you might be making that will cost you sales:

After our conversation with the music teacher we knew when her classes with our son would be, we knew how long each class would be, we knew how she would work, what activities they would do, how much she charged, and when we needed to pay. It was all good.

Then the weekend hit. And at the same time, our whole family got sick with the flu. Our kids missed an entire week of school – and our little guy missed his first music class. To top it off, we even missed paying for it, which wasn’t so bad because the music teacher’s payment policy was that she only billed for classes taken (not a great set up for her, but not what I’m talking about this time around…) A whole week went by with us being sick. Then Spring Break – no music class as there was no school.

So two weeks came and went – and we heard nothing from the music teacher about our missing payment.

IT wasn’t that we were trying to avoid paying, or that we didn’t want to pay. Nope. We had simply gotten so busy that we forgot all about it…until we picked up our son from daycare the other day and he happily told us that he loved his first music class!

Gulp! That’s when WE remembered that we had to pay.

Are you making this mistake with your prospects? I sure have! Though I’ve never started working with someone without first collecting payment from them, but I have neglected to followup with prospects for payment after explaining how everything worked, how much I charged, and when I needed payment in order to START working.

I didn’t follow up after my initial payment request/explanation because I didn’t want to be pushy or scare them off.

What often happens though is that your prospects get super busy too! Prospects may simply forget about paying you if you don’t have a simple, friendly reminder process in place.

Summary:

Work through referrals. Connect with referrals sooner rather than later. Mention who did the referring to help your prospect relax more. Explain your services and fees in a quick but very friendly manner, and be wide open to answer any and all questions your prospect may have. Be sure to follow up with prospects if they don’t pay you by a preset time – they likely just forgot.

There you have it – some simple but very powerful parts to your sales engine! Do you have them in place and working in your freelance business?

You don’t always need to be networking or speaking face to face with someone to be selling your services as a self-employed ESL teacher. The quality and style of the course material you use can help you sell even when you’re not there. Here are 3 course material strategies that will help you grow your business.

Strategy One: Never Use Photocopies. When you are first starting out, money is a huge issue. Maybe you are struggling to get food on your family’s table, or keep the rent paid, or…fill in the blank here with whatever financial pressure you are under at the moment that makes the thought of buying a course book seem like a foolish thing to do. I know all about it! Dishing out $50 or $60 bucks for a course book to use in your business feels like a huge waste of cash, and I bet your thinking goes something like: why pay that much money when I can borrow a friend’s course book and photocopy it for a fraction of the cost?

Photocopying course material is something done everywhere you find people studying English, but that does not make it right or smart. I know you know the copyright problems you are setting yourself up for. Photocopying, unless you have written permission from the publisher, is illegal. Don’t do it.

Photocopying is also terrible for your business image. What do you think you are saying about yourself and your business as you walk into your class and plop a photocopy of your course book on the table for all eyes to see?

“The teacher’s broke.”

“The teacher isn’t professional.”

What do you think a photocopied course book says about you? The opposite is also true: consider what high quality, original material says about you: This teacher is professional, serious, well-organized, and I they look like they can be trusted.

What do you want your prospects and current students thinking about you, and how does your material influence that?

Strategy Two: Use color or high quality prints If you print material from the internet for your class, like a blog post or a news story, or even if you create your own worksheets print them in the best quality possible. Full color. Strong black and whites. Never let your material look like a photocopy or poor quality product.

Remember: your students may not be the only ones who will see the material you use!

I have had people approach me for classes because they saw the cool course book my student had, or noticed a high quality article we were using in class. I once even had a CEO student of mine share the business article we were using with his entire leadership team – that was an extra 8 people who saw my material.

Truth: you never know who will see what you use in class. Make sure you are sending the right message with the quality of materials you use.

Strategy Three: Brand your Binders. I love using handouts. Consider buying your students a 3 ring binder so that they have somewhere to store all your print outs and worksheets. The bonus: customize that binder before you give it to them! Print off a full color logo and business title of your ESL business, and insert it on the binder’s cover and spine. Again, quality prints only!

Be sure to always have your phone number/cell phone, WhatsApp, website, and social media links on your materials – even if it is something as simple as a binder.

Why? I’ve walked through one of my largest client’s office spaces – that’s an office space for more than 250 people. Guess what I saw? The ones who took English classes always stored their materials on their desk for the whole world to see.

When you use real course books, and branded binders, your material stands out! Think about it: Your class finishes, and your students start to make their way to their work or wherever they need to go to next. Chances are they will carry your material in their hands. Coworkers or friends who may not be taking classes will see those materials. Conversations could be started about things like:

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Hey, what were you up to?”

Or, how about this: I’ve actually gotten new students from having a coworker walk by my student’s desk. They saw the English course material and asked: “Where are you taking English classes? Who is your teacher? Can you introduce him to me?”

Those conversations won’t happen as often if you use poor quality materials. So be brave! Tighten your belt, and invest in your business by only using great material. It IS expensive, but I have found it pays for itself over time.